My Moscow assistant met us at the station, and while we were riding in the carriage he had time to explain some of the problems that awaited me. In the first place it turned out that my extremely moderate and rational request had not been met in full by the Court Department: they had only allocated one junior footman, they had not given us a chef for the servants, only a female cook, and the worse thing of all was that there was no maid for the governess. I was particularly displeased by this, because the position of governess is fundamentally ambivalent, lying as it does on the boundary line between service personnel and court staff; exceptional tact is required here in order to avoid offending and humiliating a person who is already constantly apprehensive for her own dignity.
‘And that is still not the most deplorable thing, Mr Ziukin,’ my Moscow assistant said with those distinctive broad Moscow ‘a’s when he noticed my dissatisfaction. ‘The most lamentable thing of all is that instead of the Maly Nikolaevsky Palace in the Kremlin that was promised, you have been given the Small Hermitage in the Neskuchny Park as your residence.’
My assistant was called Kornei Selifanovich Somov, and at first glance I did not take to him at alclass="underline" a rather unattractive, skinny fellow with protruding ears and a prominent Adam’s apple. It was immediately obvious that the man had already reached the peak of his career and would not progress any further but remain stuck in the backwoods of Moscow until he retired.
‘What sort of place is this Hermitage?’ I asked with a frown.
‘A beautiful house with a quite excellent view of the Moscow River and the city. It stands in a park close to the Alexandriisky Palace, which the emperor and empress will occupy immediately before the coronation, but . . .’ Somov shrugged and spread his long arms ‘. . . it is dilapidated, cramped and it has a ghost.’ He giggled but, seeing from my face that I was in no mood for jokes, he explained. ‘The house was built in the middle of the last century. It used to belong to the Countess Chesmenskaya – the famous madwoman who was incredibly rich. You must have heard about her, Mr Ziukin. Some say that Pushkin based his Queen of Spades on her, and not the old Princess Golytsina at all.’
I do not like it when servants flaunt their erudition, and so I said nothing, but merely nodded.
Somov obviously did not understand the reason for my displeasure, for he continued in even more flamboyant style.
‘The legend has it that during the reign of Alexander I, when everyone in society was playing the newfangled game of lotto, the countess played a game with the Devil himself and staked her own soul. The servants say that sometimes on moonless nights a white figure in a nightcap wanders down the corridor, rattling the counters for lotto in a little cloth bag.’
Somov giggled again, as if to make it clear that he, as an enlightened man, did not believe in such nonsense. But I took this news quite seriously, because every servant, especially if, like me, he happens to be a member of an old court dynasty, knows that ghosts and phantoms really do exist, and joking with them or about them is a foolish and irresponsible pastime. I asked if the ghost of the old countess did anything wicked apart from rattling the counters. Somov said no, that in almost a hundred years she had never been known to play any other tricks, and I was reassured. Very well, let her wander, that was not frightening. In our Fontanny Palace we have the ghost of Gentleman of the Bedchamber Zhikharev, a handsome Adonis and prospective favourite of Catherine the Great, who was poisoned by Prince Zubov. What is an old woman in a mob cap compared with him? Our otherworldly lodger behaves in the most indecent fashion: in the darkness he pinches the ladies and the servants, and he becomes especially rowdy on the eve of the feast of St John the Baptist. It is true, however, that he does not dare to touch the ladies of the royal family – after all he is a gentleman of the bedchamber. And then in the Anichkov Palace there is the ghost of a female student from the Smolny Institute who was supposedly seduced by Tsar Nikolai Pavlovich and afterwards took her own life. At night she oozes through the walls and drops cold tears on the faces of people who are asleep. It can hardly be pleasant to be woken by cold tears and confronted by a horror like that.
Anyway, Somov did not frighten me with his ghost. It was far worse that the house really did prove to be very cramped and lacking in many conveniences. That was hardly surprising – nothing in the property had been renovated since the Court Department bought it from the Counts Chesmensky half a century earlier.
I walked round the floors, calculating what needed to be done first. I must admit that Somov had coped rather well with the basic preparations: the covers had been removed from the furniture, everything was brilliantly clean, there were fresh flowers in the bedrooms and the grand piano in the large drawing room was correctly tuned.
The lighting was a great disappointment – there was not even gas, only antediluvian oil lamps. Ah, if only I had had just one week – I would have installed a small electric generator in the basement, laid the wires, and the palace would have looked quite different. Why did we need to skulk in the oil-lit twilight? It had been like that in the Fontanny Palace thirty years earlier. Now I would need a lamplighter to keep the lamps full of oil – they were English-made, with a twenty-four-hour clock mechanism.
On the subject of clocks, I counted nineteen table and wall clocks in the house, and they all told different times. I decided that I would wind the clocks myself – it is a job that requires punctuality and precision. One can always tell a good house kept in ideal order from the way that the clocks in different rooms all tell the same time. Any experienced butler will tell you that.
I discovered only one telephone apparatus, in the hallway, and immediately ordered another two lines to be laid: one to Georgii Alexandrovich’s study and another to my room, since I would probably have to talk endlessly with the Alexandrovsky Palace, the governor general’s residence and the Court Department.
But initially I had to decide which rooms to put people in, and that was a problem that really had me racking my brains.
There were only eighteen rooms on the two floors of the house. I simply cannot imagine how everyone would have been accommodated if the grand duchess and the other children and the entire court had been with us. Somov told me that the family of Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich, including eight members of the royal family and a retinue of fourteen individuals, not counting servants, had been allocated a small mansion with fifteen rooms, so that the courtiers had been obliged to share a room between three or even four, and the servants had been accommodated over the stables. That was quite appalling, even though Nikolai Konstantinovich was two levels below Georgii Alexandrovich in seniority.